A Sound of Sheer Silence

Having affirmed Nicholas Kristof that there is value in the teachings of Jesus  even in the face of skepticism about the physical resurrection in Part 1, I would like to address Rev. Jones's position on the resurrection.   I should note that Rev. Jones reported yesterday  that she has been subject to online harassment as a result of her interview, which is (unfortunately) unsurprising, surely true, and totally unacceptable. I hope, and don't believe that I am, adding to this harassment with this post, but only to express why I think her answer doesn't really hang together or get to the heart of what is at stake with Christianity.  And, in particular, I don't think it can really answer the most powerful and sophisticated critiques of Christianity. But, first, let's start with what Rev. Jones said: KRISTOF Happy Easter, Reverend Jones! To start, do you think of Easter as a literal flesh-and-blood resurrection? I have problems with that. JONES When you look in...

Five hundred years ago yesterday, the Protestant Reformation is generally considered to begin, with the famous nailing of the 95 Theses on the cathedral of Wittenburg by Martin Luther.  Many people have or soon will be writing their takes on this significant anniversary ( here's an example of a very bad take ; here's an example of a good one from our old friend Morgan Guyton), so I figured I would try my hand at the take machine as well. The Protestant Reformation, at least in its mature form, can be distilled down to two basic commitments--(1) that the Roman Catholic Church was corrupt in a structural or existential  way, as opposed to an incidental way, and thus in need of structural reform; and (2) the solution to the structural or existential corruption, and a guidepost for the needed reforms, could be found in a purported return to a singular focus on the Biblical text.  In this way, it differed from the Catholic Counter-Reformation (itself just as much of a rev...

Now when Jesus saw great crowds around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side. A scribe then approached and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Another of his disciples said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”   (Matthew 8:18-22). A couple of weeks ago, I talked about ghosts .  In the event that you were skeptical of the power of the ghosts of the pasts, you should no longer be after watching what unfolded in Charlottesville, Virginia on Friday and Saturday.  Ghosts of the past, ghosts that many (wrongly, naively) thought were dead and buried came to life.   Ghosts took the life Heather Heyer , a martyr for justice.  Ghosts were everywhere, and their power was unmistakable. In the face of this horror, there were rays of li...

After going through five previous ideas ( "Experiental Priority, " "Contextual Theology," "Rejecting the Salvation Industrial Complex," "Franciscan Hermaneutics," and "Christ versus Empire" ) we come to the last one, "Christian Realism."  "Christian Realism" is, to the best of my knowledge, a term that I made up.  But it reflects an idea that is fundamental, if often unspoken, to the way you approach everything you might encounter when talking about religion, and in particular the way that theology interacts with the rest of the world (which, basically, is everything).  In its simplest terms, makes the claim that the physical world is (1) intelligible; (2) real [as opposed to the product of our imaginations]; and (3) ultimately the creation of God.  The theological touchstone for Christian Realism is a well-known quote by the great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas--"all that is true, by whomsoever it has be...

Perhaps the most beautiful passage in Scripture is the 13th chapter of Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians.  It is, ultimately, a beautiful ode to love and the qualities of love.  Perhaps its most famous part, often read in the context of weddings, is verses 4 through 7: Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. That part is undoubtedly lovely, but for me the most interesting section comes at the end of chapter 13.  There, it seems to me that Paul is making a case for prioritizing love as a religious principle (or, really, a principle for anything) above any other possible religious principle.  This is because, Paul argues, all of those other principles are one way or the other grounded in some form of knowledge...

1.  A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon this post on the Patheos Catholic channel .  In it, a young woman named Marina S. Olsen began what she promised is a series of posts discussing sexual sins, and she begins with masturbation.  To call the post alarmist would not do it justice--even in the heyday of the drug scares in the 80s, an anti-drug ad that adopted this tone would be seen as over-the-top.   But something struck me in reading her post--Ms. Olsen believes, with an apparently unshakable conviction, that what the Catholic Church has to say about masturbation is true.  Actually, that's not quite right--she takes as a given  that what the Church says about masturbation is true.  It is noticeable that at no point does she try to do the Dr. Greg trick, which is to justify her opposition to masturbation on the basis of ostensibly neutral or scientific grounds .  No, her thesis is that people despair about masturbation because masturbatio...

I've recently made a great discovery in the form of the blog of Morgan Guyton, a United Methodist Minister in New Orleans.  He had a post from a few weeks ago on the limitations of N.T. Wright that was great , and said in a more compact way what I was trying to get at in talking about originalism .  Today I found another post of his that is equally thought-provoking , on the idea of "ambivalence" in contemporary Christianity (Mainline Protestantism in the article, but it could apply equally well to Catholicism as well). Guyton's core point, as I see it, is that parents will have an extremely difficult time passing on their faith to their children if the parents are ambivalent about the faith that they are attempting to pass on.  Kids can sniff out the half-way in, half-way out situation of parents with regard to faith, and it gets translated into "this religion stuff is not that important."  And that, in turn, opens the door to those same kids walking out...